Part I in a 3-Part Series on Capacity, Crisis, and Sacred Survival
We’ve been sold a lie. A smooth-surfaced, hustle-wrapped, gaslight-flavoured myth: that we can — and should — operate at the same capacity all the time. Show up at 100%, even in grief. Be productive, even in pain. Push through, even when the world is falling apart.
But what happens when the world actually is falling apart?
Let’s be clear — you’re not imagining the weight. There are more active wars happening globally right now than have ever been recorded. Climate collapse is no longer a future threat — it’s here. From catastrophic wildfires and air quality emergencies, to water crises and forced migration, the Earth is telling us the truth, whether systems listen or not. Meanwhile, over 120 million people are currently displaced. That’s not a typo. And capitalism keeps grinding, acting like nothing is wrong — demanding your inbox zero, your 9-to-5, your parenting schedule, your health tracking, your activism, your taxes, your everything.
This is chronic, multilayered, collective crisis. And expecting yourself to function at full capacity through it all? That’s not noble. That’s system-gaslit.
If you’re someone who is justice-oriented — someone who feels the world’s pain as your own — then you know this tension. The pressure to act. To stay informed. To repost, donate, organize, protest. To never look away — because silence is complicity. To do it right. To do it all. To do it now.
And yet… there is a real, painful truth here: The urgency is real. But so is your nervous system. The injustice is real. But so is the cost of unrelenting exposure and overextension.
We are being shown every crisis in real time. We scroll through genocide, war, poverty, queerphobia, climate collapse — all before 9am. And even in our “rest,” we’re still metabolizing it. Still wondering if we’re doing enough. Still feeling guilty that we’re not doing more.
This isn’t just burnout. This is the weight of knowing, without the capacity to respond to all of it. And that grief? That guilt? That shutdown? It makes sense. It’s not failure. It’s feedback.
Let’s bring in the brain. When you’re under prolonged stress — like what we’ve all been under for years — your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that handles focus, decision-making, and logic) literally starts to lose density. Your body stores that stress as allostatic load — the biological wear and tear from chronic adversity. It impacts your immune system, your digestion, your sleep, your memory. It makes things foggy, fragmented, hard to hold.
And neuroplasticity? That beautiful brain rewiring function? Under trauma, it rewires for survival — not strategy. That’s why the creative vision you had might feel unreachable now. That’s why you lose words mid-sentence. That’s why responding to a text feels like running a marathon. Your body isn’t betraying you. It’s protecting you.
This series is about one thing: calling out the myth of constant capacity. Because that myth is killing us. It’s making us blame ourselves for being human in inhuman conditions. It’s pathologizing our nervous systems. It’s shaming the exhausted. And it’s not even possible in the world we’re living in.
We are not meant to be high-output machines. We are living, breathing, grieving, sensing beings. So what you feel? It’s real. And your slower pace? That’s wisdom. Not weakness.
In Part II, we’ll go deeper into what’s happening inside your system: the neuroscience of shutdown, the cost of vigilance, the truth about fatigue. In Part III, we’ll build spiral-rooted, burnout-resistant practices that actually honour what’s possible — without bypassing what’s needed. We’ll talk capacity, commitment, and care.
You are not broken. You are adapting. And your adaptation is sacred.